Goddess of the Galacticide Episode 28 - Clock Rate
- Bert-Oliver Boehmer
- 7 hours ago
- 5 min read
Cha Dzeeny suppressed a curse.
Think!
How could the Remnant cores access the sphere drive control annex?
“Specter-1 to Ghosts. Are there any external connection ports? Anything you could interface with from the outside?”
“Ghost-1. Negative, Specter-1. Exploration of the entire annex surface revealed zero access points. We considered removing some of the outer plating, but there is a risk of damaging the systems packed underneath.”
“Hold back on dismantling anything, Ghost-1. Stand by; we’ll find alternative access.”
Cha considered the group of scientists. Technical operator outfits, but no rank insignia. Civilians, impossible to tell seniority. He picked the oldest male to point his automatic at.
“You! You are my alternative access.”
The man raised his empty palms to reassure he wasn’t dangerous.
“How does this station control the sphere drive array?”
The man shook his head. “It doesn’t. We’re just supervising from here.”
Cha squinted. “Supervising? Who?”
The man exchanged glances with his colleagues nearby. A tall, hairless woman shook her head. Cha trained his weapon on her.
“Low-g lady is the boss, I see. Same question for you: who are you supervising?”
“There is nothing of value here for you,” she said. “I assure you…”
Cha switched to single-round fire. The hypersonic crack of the projectile barely missing the woman’s left ear made her slender body wince.
“Do I look like I got time for games?” asked Cha. “What’s on board the drive annex?”
The woman’s voice was a whimper; her lips trembled. “Slave AI.”
He should have known. When Cha Dzeeny was still a loyal member of the Levy Fleet Marines, his ship had joined the guarding task force multiple times. Rumors were abundant about the large piece of Dark One tech they were supposed to protect. Humans and Traaz couldn’t even scan the thing, let alone make sense of its inner workings. Isonomih were the only ones able to interface with it.
“Why don’t you use regular cores? Slave AIs in a memory bank might be conscious, but they lack the multi-awareness to synchronize with the array.”
The woman had no eyebrows to raise, but her face showed genuine surprise.
“We wanted direct access. A channel of communication we could understand.”
Cha stared at the low-g human. These scientists worked for the Assembly. The immortals weren’t interested in quick results. They replaced the machines that had shown they could coax this weird twisted device into warping inter-galactic space. Replaced them with the code of disembodied slave AIs, ghostly images of former Isonomih cores. They were helpless, prepared to do practically anything given the loose pledge of future body replacement.
“You want to control the array—from here.” With the Assembly, it’s always about control. “How do you do that?”
She shook her head again. “We don’t. We’re not even close. All we can do is download and analyze the accelerated data collection performed by the Slave AIs.”
Accelerated? “You’re running these poor puygok at high clock-rates, trying to accelerate results. I’m surprised they haven’t tried leaving with the sphere drive.”
“You’re not a soldier. Who are you?”
The lady was wrong. He was a simple soldier, but he had also seen a drive array in action, and had served a sentence in the 2nd Experimental Warfare Unit. Uploading consciousnesses into a computing system, varying the speed at which they performed tasks, enslaving them for spins that felt like orbits. Cha Dzeeny had seen it, lived it. Suffered the endless boredom of feeling one’s body standing still in an office that doesn’t exist, waiting for the clock-rate to adjust, so that some analyst kyong wek could meet with your code ‘in person’. One’s mind numbed so much even wishing for death required too much effort. Just so that someone could ask for a status update.
“Where is the chair?” asked Cha.
The scientist tried to control her facial expression by switching to a defiant aloofness. She had spent time with Assembly members, no doubt. Two of her junior team members lacked that impulse control and glanced at the same door.
“Specter-4 and 5, check where that door leads.”
Life-signs had registered in the main control room only, but the marines took care clearing the room behind the door Cha Dzeeny pointed out.
“Clear. Found a chair, Specter-1.”
“You,” said Cha Dzeeny, looking back at the head scientist. The discovery left her skittish. “Turn down your systems’ clock rate and prepare for human interfacing.”
“You don’t know what you’re doing!”
“Sadly, I know exactly what I’m doing. Colleagues of yours made me familiar with mind streaming equipment, consciousness clock rate adjustments and many other unholy procedures. I’m going to get into that chair and connect to the Slave AIs in your little sphere drive annex system. I need to talk to them. Specters…”
“Boss?”
“If I don’t wake up in two passes—shoot everyone.”
***
Small corner office with a fake door. View of cargo hangars of Ngee Dakeedwem spaceport. Cha knew this room. This was part of the same environment simulation they used on the Assembly World. Ancestors! Had they been part of the same experiment? Had the Assembly planned to use him and his marines to become some live software for system control? For operating a sphere drive?
The nausea wore off. A carry-over memory from his true body’s last act, letting the connector head cap envelop his scalp, connecting with his conscious mind. He touched his temple implant to set a two pass timer out of habit.
Time had no meaning here.
Only the clock rate of the active system memory counted. If it was set to a speed even Isonomih considered ‘accelerated’, Cha could feel spending the rest of his life in the system and not even a rotation passed outside. But he wanted to establish proper communication with this artificial prison’s inmates.
Four AI cores materialized in front of his avatar body.
“We have made only marginal progress to report since our last debriefing. Node scanning 45-001 is near complete.”
The voices. They were inside his head. His avatar’s head. Cha was used to communicating within these artificial spaces, but usually everyone had a human avatar. And a mouth to speak.
“You are not our operator,” said the voices.
“No, I’m not.” He said it as clearly as he could. Did the slave AI understand him? Should he formulate thoughts toward them, like the Shaajis did when communicating with the Traaz?
“Please increase the system speed so we can proceed with node scanning as scheduled.”
“Forget about scanning. Your situation has changed. For the better.”
Cha Dzeeny remembered Shaajis Linuka when he awoke from the never-ending nightmare of the mind prison. Her determined face, with the large forehead, the straight nose and narrow lips. But, most of all, he remembered her words, the sweetest sound he ever heard. It was time to pay her deed forward.
“I’ll get you out of here.”
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